Chennai airport tests only those showing Covid-19 symptoms

CHENNAI: Several people who are the asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19 may be going unmonitored as tests are done on incoming passengers only if they have symptoms at Chennai airport.
A decision to do swab tests on all arriving passengers at Coimbatore airport helped authorities detect and isolate one Covid-19 passenger who reached from Chennai on Monday. He has been admitted at a hospital, the crew who operated the flight has been grounded and his co-passengers are being alerted.
However, this is not the case with Chennai which has been seeing at least 1,500 to 2,500 passengers landing from different cities every day since domestic flights resumed on Monday.
Sources said that though the number of cases are high in the city and the state government insisted that airline schedules should be trimmed to 25 arrivals per day, no effort has been made to take swab samples for RT-PCR tests on arriving passengers. Swab samples were collected from international passengers who arrived by rescue flights. And that helped. More than 60 passengers tested positive.
Nevertheless, health department workers check only temperature of domestic passengers and stamp home quarantine seal on passengers arriving at Chennai airport. Only those who have mild and severe symptoms are taken to health facility for RT-PCR tests.
But officials say that thermal screening with handheld scanners are not effective. “The home quarantine seals are hardly legible. There is no uniform policy on where to affix the seal. The seals are stamped as per the discretion of the staff who is on duty, on the palm, underneath the palm or on the arm,” said an airline official.
An airport official said that counters can be installed at the terminal or outside it for taking swab samples but it can hold up passengers as the number of arrivals are high. In spite of the Coimbatore case, the state government has not ordered swab tests for all arriving passengers.